Counterfactuals: In reply to Alfred Bloom

Bloom (1981) hypothesized that the differences in counterfactual constructions in English and Chinese might affect native speakers’ inclination to think counterfactually. Because there is a distinct counterfactual construction (the subjunctive) in English but not in Chinese, Chinese sptakers might be less inclined than English speakers to think counterfactually. To test his hypothesis, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in general, Bloom prepared a story with several counterfactual implications, and asked some native Chinese and English speakers to read the story written in their native languages. He found that Chinese speakers were much less likely than English speakers to give counterfactual interpretations to the counterfactual story, and concluded that the absence of a distinct counterfactual marker could hinder counterfactual reasoning in Chinese. I have reservations about Bloom’s findings. When I (Au, 1983) read his counterfactual story, I found the Chinese text rather unidiomatic. The low counterfactual response rates given to Bloom’s Chinese versions of the story might have been due to the unidiomatic text rather than to difficulty of reasoning counterfactually in Chinese per se. I therefore tried to replicate his findings with both his story and a new counterfactual story. The Chinese bilinguals in my studies read eithe IlL2r Bloom’s or my story written iu either Chinese or English. They showed little difficulty in understanding the counterfactual in either story in either language, insofar as the English and Chinese were idiomatic. When given my story written in Chinese, nearly monolingual Chinese also gave mostly counterfactual responses. I therefore concluded that the absence a distinct counterfactual marker did not seem to hinder counterfactual reasoning in Chinese, and that the mastery of the English subjunctive by Chinese bilinguals might be quite tangential to their reasoning counterfactually in Chinese (cf. Au, 1983, In Press). Bloom (1984) has raised three objections to my (Au, 1983) conclusions